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Title:
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La Portée des Negations en Français Contemporain
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Author:
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Pierre Larrivée
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/staff/larriveep/
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Degree Awarded:
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Université Laval
, Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Translation
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Degree Date:
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1998
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Semantics
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Subject Language(s):
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French
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Director(s):
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Patrick Duffley
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Abstract:
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This thesis investigates the interpretation of linguistic utterances, about which it defends and illustrates two general hypotheses. Firstly, it is postulated that the meaning of linguistic units is situated on two levels of representation: that of the reference to the experience of the speaker that is expressed by linguistic units in some utterance, and that of the concept that represents the semantic content proper to units as elements of a linguistic system outside of any particular use. Secondly, it is proposed that the conceptual structuration of a sequence and its constitutive parts directly explains its interpretation. These hypotheses are tested through the study of the interpretation of utterances containing a negative item in contemporary standard French, in particular the meaning associated with the scope and focus of negation. Scope is the relationship that holds between a negative item and some sequence, defining a domain inside which negative polarity items and negative focus relationships can occur. Negative scope follows directly from the surface function of the item exerting it, as sentence negation is marked in standard French by the sentence modifier clitic ne which therefore takes import over the whole of the proposition. The correlation between scope and surface syntactic function, and the fact that focus holds inside the syntacticly defined domain of scope contributes to support the hypothesis that interpretation follows directly from the tructuration of utterances. Focus is the relationship that negations entertains with some item inside its scope, determining inferences that are to be drawn from sequences. As focus relationships yield a complementary term of the segment focussed by negation, they can only be established with elements allowing such an alternative to be envisaged. In argumentative uses of negation where some assertion attributed to another speaker is negated (1), the rectification that is contextually proposed to the rejected assertion provides the alternative.
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